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MONTREAL - A fter swirling a spoon into the amber-coloured honey from Miels d’Anicet, I draw up a spoonful and smear it over my tongue. This is the “summer” honey, and the flavour is complex. Harvested from mid-July to August, the honey is made from the nectar of white clover, raspberry bush, alfalfa, mint and wild flowers. There is nothing cloying or rich about it. Though delicate, it is full-flavoured. It trickles down the throat softly without a blast of sweetness hitting my molars, or any trace of bitterness catching in my throat. Divine.

The next spoonful of honey I taste comes from a squeeze bottle shaped like a teddy bear. Almost colourless, this honey is sweet, not much else. Comparing it to the Anicet honey would be like comparing a fine wine to grape juice. And that’s not being fair to the grape juice.

“For me, that little bear is the emblem of bad honey,” says Anicet Desrochers, beekeeper, beebreeder and owner of Les Miels D’Anicet. “That honey is the polar opposite of what we do. Especially since the bears eat our hives.”

What Desrochers does is make absolutely exquisite certified organic honey. “We use Anicet’s honey everywhere in our cooking,” says Toqué! chef-owner Normand Laprise, “from a fish entrée to desserts. It’s gentle and floral. I think it’s the best honey in Quebec, if not Canada.”

Lanky, laid-back and with a definite hipster style, Desrochers looks more like a U of M philosophy major than the largest producer of organic honey in North America. And yet once engaged in honey and bee discussion, the 32-year-old is more professor than student. The Desrochers family’s love of honey runs deep. His sister, Naline Dupuis-Desrochers, now runs the production of Desrochers organic honey wines (hydromel) including the renowned La Cuvée du Diable in Ferme Neuve, just north of Mount Laurier in the Upper Laurentians, founded by his father, Claude, in 1978.

Thirteen years ago, Desrochers and his wife, Anne-Virginie Schmidt, took over the family apiary, the Ferme Apicole Desrochers, renaming it Api Culture Hautes Laurentides. Also located in Ferme Neuve, Api Culture Hautes Laurentides includes both the Miels d’Anicet honey production, and a breeding centre for the Russian Primorsky Queen bees he sells to other beekeepers. There are five certified organic honey producers in Quebec, but none comes close to the production of Desrochers, who counts some 1,000 hives on his property. Each of those hives has 60,000 to 80,000 bees at work producing the 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of honey sold each year.

Organic is a word that gets tossed around often in food circles, but certified organic honey is rare. As there are no standards for USDA certified organic honey, there is no certified organic honey in the States. If you do find organic honey on American store shelves, chances are it comes from Brazil.

To be certified organic in Quebec, honey must come from hives within three kilometres of pesticide-free plants and flowers. Desrochers’s land is bee heaven: rolling hills with wild flowers, forests and fields, none of which are planted with commercial crops. His hives are set over 100 kilometres of such land, in groups of 20 to 24 hives according to the number of plants in the area. “Bees will travel up to five kilometres to get the nectar,” he says, “but normally they will stay as close as possible to the hive.”

The word “terroir” comes up often with Desrochers. The term refers primarily to products whose typicity is reflected in the land from which they are derived. Wine and cheese are the most common “produits du terroir,” yet Desrochers makes a strong case that honey also fits into that category. Well, his honey.

“All the pollens and nectars in our honey are from the plants from the Haute Laurentides,” he says. “The complexity of the honey is directly related to this specific area with wild flowers and forests. In the Eastern Townships, there is far more agriculture, so the honey is less complex. In an area like Abitibi, you are far from industrialized areas, but the cold climate is not favourable for bees, so the production is small. We are between those two climates, isolated from commercial farming yet warm enough for the bees to flourish. Everything affects honey: the temperature, the humidity, the intensity of the flowering. That’s what makes its magic.”

Yet for honey to best express its magic, it must be manipulated as little as possible. Like raw-milk cheese, honey’s flavour is at its most complex in its raw state. Unlike mass-produced honey, which is pasteurized to 60C to facilitate filtering and packaging, Miels d’Anicet never heats its honey above the internal temperature of a hive (40C), and only then after bottling to prevent it from crystallizing before being shipped.

“Honey is fragile,” says Desrochers. “It degrades easily once heated; it loses all its beauty, all the flavour and the softness. Cold extraction preserves the honey’s aroma, nutritional, and medicinal values. Large producers heat their honey to standardize the flavour; they want everything on the shelves to taste the same. And they want it to stay runny. Pasteurization is used to stop the natural crystallization process. What we want is quality and complexity, to keep honey in its purest, natural state. And raw honey should crystallize. It’s a sign that it’s rich in enzymes, that the honey is alive. People here often return the jar when the product has crystallized. Europeans have more respect for honey. They know that in the summer the honey from the hives will be liquid, but that by Christmastime it will crystallize.”

According to Desrochers, the North American taste for honey has yet to blossom. “We eat no honey,” he says. “I read a survey that only 10 per cent of 30- to 35-year olds have honey in their cupboard. We’ve lost our taste for it. We buy honey to put in our Martha Stewart recipe for barbecue sauce. But I want people to buy Anicet Spring honey to serve with cherries drizzled over sheep’s milk cheese.”

Desrochers may be discouraged, but there’s a definite wave of honey love in foodie circles south of the border. Gourmet websites feature honeys with flavour descriptions worthy of fine wines.

The Bee Raw honey company out of New York sources honey from artisanal bee keepers to produce raw, unfiltered honeys produced from a single flower or fruit varietal. Tasting kits – “honey flights” – made up of wild flower honey or honeys for cheese will set you back $45 for four one-ounce vials. Ouch. Honeys include such varieties as Maine wild raspberry honey (“light and floral, with a unique raspberry finish intertwined with the aroma of warm cocoa butter”), Wisconsin cranberry honey (“smooth, pungent and mildly tart with subtle floral hints, finishing with a very light fruit flavour”), and Florida orange blossom honey (“notes of citrus and the tangy rind are playfully intertwined in a not-too-sweet captivating finish”).

Bee Raw is just one of many companies marketing honey as the new “varietal-driven” foodstuff along the lines of wine and chocolate. When perusing shelves at the Manhattan gourmet emporium Dean & Deluca, I spotted beautifully packaged honeys labelled blackberry or blueberry, which certainly conjure up images of berry flavours wafting from your morning bagel. “Ah, the flower honeys,” says Desrochers with a laugh. “If your honey tastes like blueberries, then essential oils have been added, and then it must be labelled as ‘flavoured honey.’”

Generally, the origin of the plant doesn’t dictate the flavour profile, but Desrochers has found exceptions including a lychee honey from Reunion Island that he said really does taste like lychee fruit, and a Corsican clementine honey that has a slight citrus edge. And, he says, lavender honey does give off a lavender flavour, but only when it’s well made.

“In Europe,” says Desrochers, “you really can produce lavender or rosemary honeys because the season is longer and there are distinct periods for each flower. The beekeepers literally move the hives around according to the timing of the flowers. But in North America, the flowering season is so short that everything bursts into flower at once. For that reason we prefer to label our honeys by season: spring, summer and fall. I also have a ‘cru’ honey, a very rare honey that comes exclusively from my hives in the forest. I prefer multi-flower honeys, which are more complex, rounder and have a richness of flavour. The only exception are three honeys we make that are ‘mono-floral’: wild mint, linden and buckwheat. Bees love these flowers so much that they will favour them over others.”

The complexity of flavour in the Miels d’Anicet is also making fans of some of Quebec’s top chefs, including Laprise, Martin Picard, Patrice Demers, François Blais and Eric Gonzalez. “Chefs have the greatest impact,” says Desrochers, “because they use our products in an exceptional way. These are people who work with artisans, favour small producers and appreciate the signature we bring from our region.”

Chef Picard, Desrochers says, glazes duck legs with Miels d’Anicet, and pastry chef Demers uses it in his innovative desserts. But how does the beekeeper enjoy his honey? “I eat so much while I work every day, “ he says. “Every zone in which we have hives offers a different flavour. But I don’t spread it on my toast in the morning. I taste honey with as much reverence as foie gras or a fine wine. It’s important to take the time to uncover the subtleties of flavour, the richness, the undertones. And it’s a lot of fun. It’s not just honey, it’s linden, clover, goldenrod, raspberry flowers ... it’s 1,000 things. I understand when chefs say ‘Wow!’ ”

Miels d’Anicet honey, as well as the company’s honey mustards and organic soaps are available at Rachelle-Béry, Au Pain Doré, Première Moisson, as well as select IGA and Metro supermarkets. For a full list of store locations, visit the website api-culture.com.

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